Any website transaction, such as a hotel booking, flight check in, or concert ticket purchase, is usually broken into a series of steps which must be executed. Each step is represented by a website page containing a form a user must fill with relevant data useful to complete a task. Often these website form pages contain a number of text fields for the user to complete along with several hidden fields. Hidden fields are special website form page markup elements that contain relevant information to be transmitted between the website pages, i.e. transaction steps that must take place, but do not need to be shown to or require interaction from the user.
A web application framework is a software framework designed to support the development of dynamic websites, web applications and web services. The framework aims to alleviate overhead associated with common activities used in web development. Some of these web application frameworks keep a large amount of data inside hidden fields to save a status of the website transaction. These frameworks also automatically generate form field names which can be quite long. For example, a form field name can represent the element position inside the document by including the names of all the elements containing it.
When mobile and other devices with limited memory and network capabilities, such as smart phones and personal digital assistants, try to process a website form page built in such a manner, these devices must download a heavy weight website page, load the page and process the page in memory. When the user has entered data into the website form page, these devices also must send the website form page with the entered data along with data stored inside hidden fields back to the originating web application server for this transaction to proceed to the next step. With mobile and other devices with limited memory and network capabilities, the execution of these steps can be quite slow.